


Turbulence (The Storm Warning Remix)

by Gehayi



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens, Biblical References, Crossover, Gen, Magic, Prequel, Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 08:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1598105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before her descendent Jadis was brought to Narnia, before she herself came to Charn, Lilith was a Carrionite, and her people had been banished by the Eternals to the Deep Darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turbulence (The Storm Warning Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Storm Warning](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/49457) by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling). 
  * In response to a prompt by [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer) in the [remixmadness2014](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2014) collection. 



> **Prompt:** No safe story. WIPs and all previous remixes should be clearly marked in their summary metadata.
> 
> Fandoms in which I'd qualify for Remix under normal rules are Harry Potter, Naruto, Chronicles of Narnia, Homestuck, Angel Sanctuary, Inception, Star Trek: AOS, and The Dark Is Rising. I have also written passingly in many other fandoms, including various crossovers.

Before her descendent Jadis was brought to Narnia, before she herself fled with her sisters and children to Charn from the chains that had been placed on them, Lilith was a Carrionite scientist.

It was not science as most worlds would come to know it, for mathematics had no part in it, only words. It was the verbal equivalent of what a pair of mathematically gifted identical twins would someday describe as block transfer computations, obeying no known physical laws but instead, shaping and rewriting them. But, like so many scientists from highly technological cultures, communication across great distances was vital for Carrionites, and they spent much of their time taking and experimenting with DNA samples and anti-gravity. So they shaped themselves into telepaths of a sort (though not so strong as to make life unbearable). They learned that they could—with a hair or a drop of blood—manipulate the person to whom the sample had once belonged. They learned to phase in and out of existence, to teleport, and to fly. And it was all done by the power of words…and Carrionite will.

In fact, it might be more accurate to call the Carrionites "witches."

Had it not been for the Hervoken, it might have been millennia before the Eternals troubled the Carrionites. Then again, it might not. By the time that war broke out with the Hervoken, the universe had already transformed a hundred times—no, a thousand.

The Hervoken were weirdish creatures. Their heads were like large pale pumpkins; their hands were as long as most human forearms. They spoke by clacking their teeth together and creating green sparks. And they did not walk, or fly, or slither; they drifted above the ground, manipulating air currents in order to move.

The creatures were not masters of words as the Carrionites were, but they had a knack for chanting that more than equaled the latter, and the Hervokens' long, multi-jointed, taloned fingers were ideal for shaping sigils in the air. It was enough and more than enough.

The Eternals—disembodied beings of energy and thought who primarily used the Ephemeral world as a source of entertainment—were appalled by the Carrionite and Hervoken ability to reshape reality, and banished both into a void so deep that it seemed impossible that either would ever climb out of it…for this void was the all but empty subconsciousness of small animals on a distant world. The beasts had no mind to speak of, and certainly no imagination. Without bodies, neither race could use its science to shape the animals into something that they could use or possess; without bodies, neither one could ever be free. 

And so things might have stood forever, if not for the Carrionite scientist Lilith.

***

Lilith alone managed to evade the Eternals, phasing out of physical existence just enough to leave only the slightest heat signature. She knew that the Eternals would be seeking her home planet not for a temporarily non-corporeal scientist but for immense skeletal crows. So she hid in plain sight, certain that they would not be looking for her there…and that even if they did spot her, that they would leave her be, for one Carrionite trapped on her homeworld would not have anything close to the energy needed to transport herself across solar systems and galaxies, much less enough to free her people. That is, if the Eternals even thought that she would do such a thing, for even at the dawn of time, Eternals were not noted for possessing much in the way of imagination. 

So she hid. And whether or not the Eternals knew that one Carrionite remained…well, who can say? Lilith always believed that they knew but thought that powerless exile on an empty planet was punishment enough.

 _What a terrible sin! Reshaping the universe according to my designs and not theirs._

She did not flee her homeworld instantly. No, she took the time to study—no, to memorize—huge tomes that she would need for millennia to come. She used her energy to reshape her body and brain so that she could live and thrive in whatever environment her people's hosts resided without growing sick or wearing out. She studied every imaginable kind of food so that she could make it adapt to her body, or her body to it. And she learned how to make machines and the tools to build those machines—just in case, by some horrible mischance, her science did not work on the prison planet. The Eternals might have hampered it somehow, as a kind of jest.

At last, however, the day came when she felt herself to be mistress of metamorphosis and machinery, of memory and magic. And so she sent out a signal—almost a song—pitched only for the ears of someone like herself, who felt wronged by those with untold power.

The identity of the Time Lord who helped her has been lost. Some say that it was the Master, who planned to use Lilith and her abilities as a weapon; others, that it was the Rani, who admired another woman of determination of scientific mind. Still others swear that it was Lady Scintilla, the infamous outlaw who was later exiled to Shada for "conspiring with Carrionites." But it was none of these. She was simply a young and rebellious child, barely past her ninety-fifth birthday, valuable because, first, her mother (or perhaps the woman who contributed most of her DNA to a genetic loom—history is inexact) had access to one of the first TARDISes available to Time Lords and, secondly, because she considered a journey to a technologically untouched world to be an adventure worth having. And if the Eternals had forbidden travel to the Carrionite homeworld, what did that matter? The Eternals had long been scornful of those Gallifreyans who were merely lords of the tiny domain of time, and this young Time Lord rebel, like all her people, had a full measure of pride. No arrogant Eternal would tell _her_ what to do.

Lilith was careful not to confront the young Time Lord directly. She re-shaped reality as the TARDIS landed, but only fractionally, so none of the doors of the TARDIS would be locked to her. And then, when the girl walked out to explore this alien world (as indeed, how could she not?) , Lilith slipped inside the TARDIS, passing through several doors before she took on solid form once again.

The effort cost her much more than she had anticipated, for she could not shift to her normal form. She needed to assume a form that suited the TARDIS's environment more than the winds of her own world. Her bony exoskeleton was covered in fat and meat; her vast and majestic black wings were amputated. And, while she had shaped her body and brain so that she would retain her power in any form, learning to access it again was a different matter.

Perhaps if she had had more time, she could have re-learned how to perform Carrionite science while still a stowaway. But the young Time Lord, while rebellious enough to defy the Eternals, was not quite bold enough to defy her family or the Council of Time Lords. She did as Lilith's signal had bidden her, conveying the TARDIS to prehistoric Earth. And, when she landed, she only left the TARDIS long enough for Lilith to creep from the ship with what food, tools and weaponry she had stolen from her unwitting host. Then the Time Lord went home, unaware of how much things had changed on an alien world because of her.

***

Lilith quickly learned to her pleasure that the Eternals had planned badly, for Earth was not the stranger to alien life that a prison for reality warpers should be. Survivors of a race called the Jagaroth had fled to Earth during a war several hundred million years before, and the last of them had splintered into fragments strewn across time. The stonelike hand of an evil Kastrian scientist had been buried far below Earth's soil for nearly a hundred and fifty million of those years. A gestalt entity, the last remnant of the Xeraphin, arrived during what Terran scientists would later call the Jurassic era. A freighter from the year 2526 crashed into Earth, its anti-matter engines causing an explosion that altered Earth's climate so drastically that the dinosaurs died out; the misnamed lizard people later called Silurians and their aquatic cousins, the Sea Devils, survived this catastrophe, but fled into suspended animation when a meteor threatened Earth. It later became Earth's moon. And, perhaps most significantly, a skull of a Fendahl, a creature that devoured all life indiscriminately, landed on Earth roughly twelve million years before the Christian era…where it immediately began affecting human evolution. 

_Human_ evolution. The young Time Lord's TARDIS had brought her to the right place, but not the right time. Hundreds of millions of years had passed during her journey, and the small animals in whose subconscious minds her people and the Hervoken had been placed had become people—not particularly advanced people, but people nevertheless.

Fortunately, she did not have to work in a vacuum. She was one of many. Unfortunately, her goals were opposed those of many of the other scientists—or shards of scientists. They wanted a subject race: obedient, malleable and easily intimidated. She needed intelligent humans: imaginative, inventive, stubborn and determined beyond reason. 

That such creatures would eventually defy her and try to go their own way went without saying. Yet humans not only had to learn that reality could be changed but to crave it, seeking it no matter who or what proclaimed that it was foul, forbidden and wrong. It was the only way that Lilith could begin to unlock the doors in their minds and let her sisters go.

***

It took time for her to shape human minds—eons longer than she would have expected, given the Carrionite science at her fingertips. But her human form was not equipped to shape many of the words that Carrionites routinely used, and it took enormous amounts of energy to shift her body from human to Carrionite and back again. Also, as she discovered to her disgust, she could get stuck between bodies, resembling nothing so much a withered and diseased hag. It took energy to remain as a young and healthy Terran female, too, but not nearly as much as regular metamorphosis did. She only shifted into Carrionite shape when she felt half-starved for flight and needed to stretch her wings or die screaming.

Inevitably, someone saw her flying. Some called her a goddess, which amused and flattered her. Others called her an evil spirit of air and darkness, saying that she stole children. (Which she did, though she did not kill or eat them. She simply did not think that taking children away from their families forever and honing their talents and creativity counted as harm…though the children and their parents might well have disagreed. ) She did not know whether to be pleased by the "spirit of air and darkness" accusation or to be vexed beyond words.

Though humans were not especially attractive to her physically, she did take lovers, both male and female. (The Carrionites had never cared much about preference; females could bear boys and girls in the conventional way or reproduce by parthenogenesis, and most lay with whomever they wanted among their fellow Carrionites or whomever they desired that they had spun into existence.) One of her earliest mates was a man she called Red Earth; he was not unattractive, despite his inevitable lack of wings, and while he was not nearly as intelligent as she was, he could make her laugh, which was no small gift. And she had made it perfectly clear to him beforehand that she was his equal. She was not and she knew it, but she thought it would be kinder if she put it that way.

Unluckily, Red Earth did not take her seriously. 

She was patient. She truly was. But—despite his being comparatively well-educated for the time and the place and despite knowing how she wanted to be treated—he could not wrap his mind around the concept of a female, even one as extraordinary as herself, being his equal. Their final quarrel was about sexual positions on the surface and who was dominating whom at bottom. The next day, weary of Red Earth's posturing and feeling that a characteristically Carrionite exit was demanded, she winged her way south, ignoring his shouts after her that there were no other women on the planet save her. It was a dramatic lie and therefore bordering on an attempt at imaginative fiction, but that wasn't quite what she was looking for.

After that debacle, she traveled a great deal, never staying long in one place. That, she felt, had been her original mistake; Red Earth (who had later become the mate of a woman named Breath) and his people had come to take her strength and wisdom for granted for too many years, eventually spreading a distorted tale about her disobeying Red Earth (that much, at least, was true) and that she had been driven into a dark wasteland by the will of the Eternal One. False, of course, but closer to reality than she would have liked.

She taught the principles behind Carrionite science and told stories wherever she could, though she found that the old and the young rather than those in the prime of life, and women rather than men, tended to listen to her. It was long, slow, arduous work, like water wearing away stone. But eventually, she found herself coming to villages and town that she had never seen and hearing stories and ways of practicing magic that she had never heard. Fire and water, earth and iron and salt, herbs, art and words. All being used to heal, to fix, to curse and to summon. 

To change the world with will and word.

Centuries passed. Millennia. She was known in a thousand countries and cultures by ten thousand different names. And the humans were learning, oh, yes. A handful of her sisters had been freed, and if that was pathetically few, still it was a beginning. The Eternals did not seem to even be aware that the Carrionites were slowly crawling from their odious prison, given new form by the few humans who could manage Carrionite science. Not enough to make a difference, and while some words had power, the difference between what they had and what they needed was that between a lightning bug and actual lightning.

Still, it was progress of a sort, though Lilith could have wished that her students and sisters would learn faster. She might even have been happy, if not for the Time Lord who kept haunting her footsteps. Haunting _Earth_.

Not the girl who had brought her here so long ago. Even when Lilith saw him in the youth of his first incarnation, he was older and stronger and far more knowledgeable about power and peril than the young Time Lord had ever been.

She watched him covertly from afar, studying him but not challenging him. She had a feeling that doing so would be unwise.

She also noticed that he was often watched with equal interest by an enormous lion. The lion—whom the Time Lord never seemed to see—worried her more than the Time Lord himself. She had a feeling that it would need only to roar and bring her millennial-long plans crashing about her ears.

***

At last the time that she had foreseen came to pass. The humans had learned all that they could. The Carrionites needed only one human who could use words, if not perfectly, as close as was possible for their race. Then the prison doors would be open for her people at last…and for the few Hervoken who had survived. But Lilith doubted if they would be much of a threat. The concept of sigils had contaminated human magic; there was no getting away from that. But the use of iron and salt in ritual and ceremony had also seeped into their minds, and Hervoken and their science were profoundly allergic to both. The second war with the Hervoken was over before it had begun.

Yet it troubled her that those who had managed to free themselves would have to wait for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, bound increasingly by human law and dominated by human custom. She could work and experiment for endless years, if that was what it took to save her race, but she chafed at waiting in grey and silent servitude. It reminded her too much of Red Earth's attempt to rule her.

And so she spoke to the handful of her sisters who were free, as well as her many daughters, and asked what they wished to do for the years that they must wait. Three—two of her sisters and her youngest daughter, who was also called Lilith—said that they would stay and search for the wordspinner their people still so needed for liberation. But the others felt hampered by law and custom and forms that hindered their ability to use their power fully. 

"And you, All-Mother," said one of her daughters. "You have served loyally on this world for millions of years. Surely you will come with us to a world where we can be ourselves in body and mind."

Lilith bowed her head and agreed. And so it was decided: they would cross the void of space to another world with Lilith in physical form (someone had to obtain and, possibly, steer the ship) while her sisters and daughters phased into invisibility.

Perhaps out of a sense of perversity, Lilith decided to find the Time Lord who had troubled her for years. Perhaps she could not leave Earth with this one fear unfaced. And so she searched for him and eventually found him, a thin young man in a brown suit, recently having returned from Mars.

Now, the Time Lord recognized her quickly enough as alien (though not as Carrionite), and at first was loath to trust her. But she told him—and this was no more than the truth—that she was sick of being trapped on Earth, and that what she wanted was no more than to be free on another world with her children.

Her sisters and daughters might want to not only conquer a world but reshape the universe once more, but she very carefully did _not_ say that.

Her sincerity and distress convinced him, and so he invited her aboard his TARDIS, swearing that he would find a planet fit for her to live on. She accepted and, with her phased sisters and daughters, came aboard.

Yet perhaps even as he uttered the invitation, he had his suspicions. For eventually he brought her (as well as his passengers-in-hiding) to an ancient world filled with ruins and lit by a large, cold, red sun, then stepped outside the TARDIS and bade her to come and see how beautiful it was. And so full of cheer and life did he sound that Lilith obeyed, and her sisters and daughters followed after her. And so she and they wandered through the ruins and across the hills until they realized that the Time Lord had slipped away and left them behind.

Then Lilith, whose body had grown in size and stature as soon as she set foot on the world, sang-spoke Words granting her sisters and daughters the bodies they longed for in their hearts and of a similar size and stature to her own. And at once she was surrounded by women—aye, and a few men—some bony, some winged, and all giantish.

"The Time Lord thinks he has trapped me on a dying world," she said with a smile. "But I tell you, we will build a vast and powerful empire ruled by word science before any Eternal even realizes we are here. We will prolong the life of this world and that sun. And we will not be stopped."

"What will you call this world, All-Mother?" asked one of her daughters.

Lilith thought of the Deep Darkness in which so many had been ensnared, the bleakness of Eternals' justice, and the blackness of space.

"Charn," she said, speaking the Carrionite word for the darkness of a black hole. "I am weary of hiding my face and my intentions; I am weary of those who claim to walk in the light while despising and trying to control us. It shall not be so on _this_ world. Let there be darkness."


End file.
